


Let Me Let You Go

by AreWeAsBandits



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, Feelings, Heavy Angst, Implied Character Death, I’m sorry, ambiguous amberprice, really it's very heavy angst, this is basically the emo fic literally no one asked for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-13 07:49:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19246921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AreWeAsBandits/pseuds/AreWeAsBandits
Summary: Rachel's gone. Chloe isn't coping.





	Let Me Let You Go

**Author's Note:**

> I know some folks aren't into reading tags, so I want to emphasize how heavy this actually is. To a degree, most of the things I write are angsty, but this is Angsty.
> 
> Many, many thanks to [Ghost_in_the_Hella](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ghost_in_the_Hella) for the lovely beta on this and helping to make it into a much more coherent thing.
> 
> The title comes from Billie Eilish's [when the party's over](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6WNdcZpDhQ), which overall screams Amberprice to me.

The pillow still smells like Rachel.

Chloe buries her face in it and sucks the scent of jasmine down deep into her lungs until her head swims. If she holds it in long enough, she can almost feel the bed dip beside her. She can almost feel Rachel’s arm snake around her waist and tug her close. Her ears almost catch the lilted laughter and she can almost feel the ghost of warm breath on her neck.

She shivers and exhales with as much force as she can muster, like if she can clear the air with enough conviction then maybe everything it carries will stay gone. Maybe, if she can stop breathing it in, she can forget what Rachel’s scent smells like. She can forget the memories and the touch and the taste of her. She can move on.

Like Rachel moved on.

Chloe grips the pillow, sits up, and hurls it across the room in one fluid motion. It smacks into the graffiti she drew on the wall and drops to the floor.

_Everybody lies. No exceptions._

Chloe can’t help it: she laughs. She laughs at the irony, the _bullshit_ of it all, and once she starts laughing, she can’t stop. She laughs until a stitch grips at her side and she’s pulling in air in shaky gulps and the gulping turns to sobbing and _goddamn it_ she doesn’t want to cry any more tears over Rachel fucking Amber—how does she even have tears left?—but she can’t stop that either.

She knows she shouldn’t be mad at Rachel. Not really. She doesn’t have any right to be mad when Rachel told her years ago how badly she wanted to leave Arcadia Bay. This is Chloe’s own damn fault for letting herself get attached. It’s her own fault for being stupid enough to believe Rachel when she looked her in the eyes underneath a lamp post—or across a booth at Two Whales, or from the passenger seat of the truck, or when she didn’t look Chloe in the eyes at all because the two of them were molded so closely into one another that eye contact was impossible—and said they were going to escape together.

“Just you and me,” Rachel said. She said that every fucking time.

Everybody lies and everybody leaves. No exceptions.

And Chloe is fucking pissed at Rachel for leaving her behind.

She digs her palms against her eyes to wipe them and leans across the bed to grab her ashtray, cigarettes, and lighter. Her fingers fumble around the Bic and it takes her three tries to get a flame to lick at the end of the cigarette. She breathes the smoke in deep and her brain conjures memories without her consent: Rachel slipping the cigarette from Chloe’s fingers and pursing her own smirking lips around it; Rachel modeling outfits with that stolen cigarette stuck between her lips, rotating her body in the center of the room, waiting for Chloe’s approval as if it wasn’t painfully obvious that Chloe approved of anything, everything, as long as it was on Rachel.

“Why are you trying so hard?” Chloe had finally asked, propping herself up on her elbows on the bed. “The entire Vortex Club already kisses your ass.”

Rachel rolled her eyes and took the cigarette from her mouth, blowing out smoke. “You weren’t listening to a thing I just said. Were you?”

Chloe scoffed and sat up. “I was.”

But she wasn’t. She didn’t hear a word of it. How could she with Rachel’s eyes on her, hesitant and hopeful in a way Rachel so rarely was? With Rachel’s full and complete attention on her, searching for her opinion like it actually mattered; like they were equals? Not to mention Rachel in various states of dress and undress in the middle of her bedroom. How could she process words when she was already trying to process all of _that_?

Rachel cocked her hip and placed her free hand on it, watching Chloe with a gaze that so pointedly said _I don’t believe you_ that Chloe had to look away.

“Okay, shit. I might’ve missed the last part,” Chloe mumbled. _And the middle. And the beginning._

“This is it, Chlo,” Rachel said, pressing the cigarette into the ashtray on the desk on her way to sit beside Chloe. “My shot with a _real photographer_.”

“Right. Yeah, I remember that. That’s awesome, Rach.” She meant it, then. She’s not sure she’d mean it now, knowing it must’ve been the catalyst that finally convinced Rachel to leave the Bay. The thing that finally gave her a way out, without Chloe tagging along.

Still, Rachel’s eyes looked so sincere, sparkling when she said, “This is our way out of here, Chloe.” She grinned and gripped Chloe’s arm. “We’re gonna leave this shithole behind, just you and me.”

And Chloe couldn’t help it; she nodded and grinned back. She couldn’t help believing Rachel.

_Everybody lies. No exceptions._

Chloe’s phone buzzes and she jumps, lunging for it out of pure instinct. A lump lodges in her throat, full of undeniable hope that _this one will be her_ , that it’ll be an apology for this stupid misunderstanding that’ll seem trivial by next week, one of those things they’ll laugh about later in the junkyard over beers and a bong, and how utterly and completely Chloe fucking lost it this week will be that other sort of thing she vows never to talk about with anyone, ever.

The lump sinks into a knot in her stomach when she sees Joyce’s name on the screen instead.

It twists somewhere deep in her gut when she looks at all the missed calls and the unanswered text messages, when she thinks about the minutes upon minutes of voicemails she left until Rachel’s mailbox filled up with them and wouldn’t let her leave any more.

She hates herself for falling apart like this. She hates herself for getting attached when she knows—she _knows_ —that all anyone she loves ever does is leave. She hates herself for knowing all of these things and still dropping everything on the idiotic hope that Rachel will come back into her life. She hates that she knows goddamn well she’d take her back in a second if she did.

She hates that there’s still a part of her waiting for Rachel to come back, waiting to escape together, just like they planned.

_Just you and me._

**Author's Note:**

> You can commiserate about LiS with me on [tumblr](https://areweasbandits.tumblr.com).


End file.
